I love NewRelic, but their pricing always baffled me.
When we added it to our QA, UAT, and Staging envs, they started wanting to bill us as if we had 3x as many "production" environments. I had to explain on a call that it doesn't make sense that environments that get .0001% of the production traffic are billed at the exact same price. Basically punishing us for having a more mature SDLC.
We also run our infrastructure with redundancy, so we got billed for every region & availability zone, they wanted it to be crazy expensive.
I'm curious how this changes things, the new "pro" pricing is not available sadly :(
This is the exact same situation my company finds itself in. We are stuck with it because they have decent APM metrics for .NET Java and JavaScript and it’s nice it’s all in one dashboard. The new UI is pretty difficult to use and way too bright. Currently exploring other options and would be happy to switch to a more affordable competitor.
We had a similar experience, so I'm just sharing the path we took.
We were using New Relic APM and Server Monitoring through the Microsoft BizSpark benefits for an year or two. We were even ready to pay for their licenses, but New Relic pricing for multi-server use was starkly high for a small tech company like ours. Their product was good, but their focus was more on enterprise customers.
After trying out many other commercial products (focusing on .NET Core stack in particular), and keeping long-term scalability and TCO in mind, we decided to utilize some open source solutions.
First we tried Bosun[1] (from the Stack Exchange team), but found little progress being made on it. Then, we tried Prometheus[2] collectors for monitoring, Grafana[3] for the dashboards and alerting, and Exceptional[4] for logging. One person got it all working within a week. We've never looked back, and have to hardly touch the set-up anymore (except for system updates once in a while). It has worked beautifully for almost two years now, going from 2 to a few dozen apps/servers/VMs.
Hope it helps you, and others, explore the open source monitoring route.
You may want to try site24x7.com. Similar offering to what newrelic, datadog and the likes give in APM and infrastructure monitoring space with lower costs yet comparable to the feature sets offered.
Came here to share this - NR just redid their entire pricing structure, in my opinion it's now a much better approach for horizontal scaling.
Most everything is now part of a single product: New Relic One. You pay for data ingest beyond the first 100GB and you pay per seat for seats after the first. The AI pieces have some additional costs after a certain point as well, but from my understanding the free tier is very generous.
source: Worked at NR 5yrs ago for several years on an agent team (frequently lamented pricing structure), joined again about a month ago.
I've long preferred New Relic as well - it always seemed the most natural to use; the information that was important was easy to find. Some other APM's didn't even seem to be recording accurate metrics, but ones that did were still more difficult to navigate.
I've also had some issues with New Relic - constant problems with metric names exploding. Individual unique urls that saw especially high traffic routinely ended up getting their own unique metric name until new metric name creation would get locked. This would be despite us explicitly naming requests through the sdk.
All that said, the biggest reason I still use them is because we're still on some ancient pricing that's a fraction of their current (up until now) pricing. Our rep's been bugging me to get on a call about "renewal" but if our price is going to go up 5-10x I'm moving.
"Well you learn things from development environments." Yes I know, but I'm paying a pretty penny to monitor production environments, and other places give development licenses for free.
It's impressive it took them this long in the face of Datadog and who ever else pioneered the open source agent approach.
It was such a clear advantage to ensure you knew what was going on your servers, or into your app in the APM case, and of course you could fix / extend it if needed.
It only shows how high is their client inertia and how shielded they were from competition. A lot of companies where moving to Datadog was more expensive than continuing to pay for New Relic.
> In what New Relic executives described as adjusting to a “sea change” in open source adoption
Am I missing something or did this statement strike anyone else as wildly bizarre?
I feel like open source has been the default for the client side agents and libraries of SaaS products for 10 years. Microsoft, once the strongest opponent of open source, changed its tune like 5+ years ago. What could possibly be the “sea change” this executive is referring to?
I've mostly worked for companies that were all in on things like open source and cloud my entire career, but it's easy to forget that there are huge companies that just recently replaced their tape drives.
If I were to guess at the "sea change" discussed herein I'd say it's probably the explosion of tech around Kubernetes and the CNCF, as that created a very sudden and urgent need for better observability tooling.
- I typed these words all by myself and they are not official New Relic words, you can tell because they're not terribly well-formed and they aren't surrounded by logos and trademarks and buzzwords. Using the haphazardly spewed opinions of strangers on the internet as investment advice is a really, really terrible idea; like "open source is a virus" level of bad. Don't do it.
Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s. There was OpenStack, Hadoop, and obviously Linux itself has been widely adopted since before New Relic’s founding (2008).
Arguably micro services have increased the need for observability tooling, but even that “sea change” is years long in the tooth. Sure large enterprises are slow to adopt such trends, but it’s been happening and is hardly a sudden shocking development.
Maybe I’m just being pedantic or nit picky, but it does seem extra worrisome when the executives for a struggling company say something that sounds dramatically out of touch.
"Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s"
True, also not related to the point I was trying to make. Executives tend to be handwavey and vague sometimes but I'm pretty sure the "sea change" they're talking about in this case is about containerization and the rapid evolution of open source projects in that space, many of them related to observability. Kubecon had 500 attendees in 2015 and 12,000 in 2019. It's hard to deny that the popularity of that community will sway popular opinion about what technologies to embrace moving forward. I think (and again, I am guessing as I have exactly zero information that the public does not have) that New Relic and other companies are in part making decisions like this because it's becoming clear they will be left behind if they don't, and quickly.
I bet the first post-covid Kubecon will have 20k attendees and be taken over by the execs and VCs who've realized that's where the devs are, just in time for the devs to stop going and start the next thing á la reInvent. Wish I had gone before it blew up.
I also feel like "struggling" is a bit of an overstatement for a company with a $4B market cap, but maybe that's just me. I'm sure most FAANG4LYFers look at that like a lemonade stand.
Sadly that’s not what is keep our customers off New Relic. They don’t care that much about open source agent, but they do care about where the server is.
I understand the it’s not triviel to develop, but there is still a huge underserved marked for on-premise APMs, and those you can buy aren’t nearly as good as New Relic.
Alas developing non-saas software is not exactly en vogue
Sometimes it is. I was heavily involved with a decision between Datadog vs New Relic (plus a few others) at a former "unicorn" startup. We definitely did not want to run the server-side ourselves, but having the client libraries be open source was a major advantage for Datadog. It let us extend them to support our very old Django version and homegrown SOA framework
I've had some success convincing anti-cloud (cloud reticent?) companies by pointing to things like FedRAMP compliance: "You know how hard it is to get ______ compliance? Your data is probably safer there..." kind of conversations.
I'm sure your mileage will vary but in my not so humble opinion companies that are still trying to cling to their aging fleet of servers are making pretty poor business decisions. I think this internet stuff is catching on.
- I work at NR, these questionable opinions are mine and not those of my employer though I might have stolen them from my friend Vicky who yells about software a lot. Don't buy stock because I typed some words on a webpage that's ridiculous, also maybe don't buy stock period. Buy bitcoin it's the new pet rocks.
My understanding is that it has more to do with the general direction of observability. The agent code was always open, we frequently accepted PRs from the community when I was on their Ruby agent team, but they didn't use an open source license.
We're public so I probably shouldn't guess too much about the motivations beyond the explosion of interest in observability/kubernetes/cncf, but I do know there has been support for open sourcing these for a long time within the company and I'm glad to see it finally happen.
disclosure: I work at NR but my opinions are in fact cake and should not be used to make investment decisions (seriously that is a terrible idea I mostly invest in LEGOs and Magic cards)
It's stupid that it was closed source in the first place. The valuable stuff is on the server side. This is not really anything exciting, if they open sourced their servers, that would be very interesting.
Sounds to me like they are now open to the idea, that way more people use some standard that they can have input on, and then they can capture the customers that don't want to try and reinvent the wheel.
This looks great to me, often I work on projects with closed systems, they aren't allowed to ship the telemetry outside their own network, so none of the SaaS solutions will work. However I work on other projects that I can use SaaS, but I'm not going to do the work to have two solutions depending on the environment.
I think this is probably less relevant today - after a certain size the "moat" for an observability company starts to be their existing customer base. If NR works with everything and everything works with NR it's much harder to make a case that you should continue adding alternatives to your observability stack.
- opinions expressed here are exactly those of a misguided employee with too much time on his hands and not those of said employee's corporate overlord, if you take any of my nonsensical rambling as investment advice you do so at your own peril. I regularly gamble all of my rupees away on coinflip games in Zelda.
While I do not condone the use of the s-word here I understand the sentiment and I am also glad to see that they've open sourced them, however belated the decision.
With regard to opening the servers I've actually just now submitted a request to give all of hacker news direct access to the infrastructure via SSH. I'll let you know what they say.
- I work at NR, my words are terrible and unfit for any purpose but especially investment advice. If you read them and make bad decisions this paragraph is designed to prevent me from going to Martha-Stewart-jail. I hear they have tennis but I quite like choosing my own clothing.
Stagnant seems like an overstatement given 500 commits on one of the agents alone in the last month. There is surely a way to criticize without devaluing the unread contributions of literally hundreds of developers.
I personally am much more motivated by seeing customers encouraged to add support for their favorite libraries and frameworks than scoring their sweet free codes, but I suppose there is potentially a sinister motive behind everything in life... like open source.
I suppose I am just frustrated by things like no modern solr support, no support for jenkins when datadog has a great plugin, and not great support for non-web analytics (at least with python and php which I have plugged into it).
Also you can't copy/query things in from cloudwatch; they just started supporting EFS/NFS statistics recently after losing them for almost a year when they killed the old infrastructure agent vs the new one (reduction in features on new product!)
When I brought up my frustrations with the product after coming back to it after a few years away they told me "it was all necessary to support kubernetes"
I guess my tastes in frameworks don't match theirs? They keep cashing the checks though.
Didip! Long time - I'm back at NR as of a month ago after 5yrs away.
We did have all the agent code out in the open but it was more "source available" than it was open source. You could see what was happening but not build on it and use it for your own nefarious purposes as you can now.
When we added it to our QA, UAT, and Staging envs, they started wanting to bill us as if we had 3x as many "production" environments. I had to explain on a call that it doesn't make sense that environments that get .0001% of the production traffic are billed at the exact same price. Basically punishing us for having a more mature SDLC.
We also run our infrastructure with redundancy, so we got billed for every region & availability zone, they wanted it to be crazy expensive.
I'm curious how this changes things, the new "pro" pricing is not available sadly :(